I've had quite a few people ask me how I draw the way I
do. I figure if the handful of people who ask me want to know, there are probably more
who haven't written but wouldn't mind knowing, so here's basically my drawing manual
(formatted to be kind to printers), which
really isn't that much different from many others. And this, as
opposed to email, has the benefit of coming with illustrations!

THE FACE

Always start with a circle. This represents the
head, which is the most important part of your drawing. It
doesn't have to be a perfect circle (but it helps to get as close as
possible, of course) and can be very sketchy. This is just to
cement the location of the head on your paper.

Draw a curved, horizontal line across your circle. This is
your eye line, the line on which the eyes of your character will
rest. Depending on the character, it can be in different
places; I usually find I put mine about 3/4 of the way down the
circle but I know I need more variety in my character design.
If you want to have some fun, you can vary it a lot and see what
effects you get. Generally, the lower you put the eyes in the face, the younger the character looks.
It's curved to give the
illusion of depth. Suddenly your circle is a sphere, and the
line shows how it curves. Keep telling yourself your drawing
is three-dimensional, don't let the flat paper throw you off.
You don't have to draw it
perfectly level - tilting it is the best (only) way to depict a
tilted head.

Next, draw a vertical line that is at a right angle to the eye
line. This gives you the idea of where the center of the face
is. It's very important to keep the features placed in the
same place on either side of the line ... unless you're drawing
someone with an extremely odd face, that is. But the most
important thing is to keep it at a right angle to your eye line, or
else your face will look all wonky. This line is also
sometimes curved, especially if your character has a receding chin
or slanted forehead. Feel free to play with the shape of this
center line, have it curve drastically, have it almost straight,
give it a sharp angle – it's a great way to explore characters.

With these crosshairs of the face, you
can make the head circle look like it's facing any direction. This
grid is also your roadmap to being able to draw the same character
in different poses, because you'll be able to plop down the features
at pre-arranged places according to how far they are from the center
lines.

From here forward, the order in which you do
these steps is entirely up to you.

Draw in the contour of the
face, remembering the eye socket, flesh for the cheeks, the chin,
etc.

Draw in the nose and
ear. I like to draw the nose first to cement the centre of the
face and the perspective in which I'm working, as well as the shape
of the eye sockets.

Draw in the rest of the
features. In real life, the eyes are usually one eye width
apart and the mouth is halfway between the nose and the chin, but
these are cartoon characters, so they don't have to obey the
rules. It's good to know them anyway, though.

Sketch in the general shape
of the hair, paying attention to the way it parts and the volume of
each section.

Add texture to the hair,
especially where the line changes direction. Don't make the
tufts of hair zigzag in a sawtooth pattern, make random shapes and
sizes, which makes it look more realistic and interesting.

ATTACHING THE HEAD TO THE BODY

Here's a very anatomical
drawing of the neck, from the front. Actually, to be really
accurate, the neck is usually as wide as the head - this sounds
weird but it's true. For cartoons, though, it usually looks
better to have a thinner neck (unless the character needs a fat
one). Notice that the neck is
almost like a cylinder, its sides are parallel until they widen into
the shoulders at the bottom. The collarbones are illustrated
at the bottom, the diagonal lines running up the neck are the
sternocleidomastoid muscles which run from the inside of the
collarbone to behind the ear. You don't have to draw these,
but it's a good idea to know they're there.

Here's the head, neck, and
shoulders in profile. Notice how the neck is attached more
towards the back of the head than the front. The back of the
neck is the spine, which attaches to the back of the skull, all
that's in front are the tubes and muscles that allow you to eat,
breathe, and look at the clouds. The shoulders look like they
face slightly forward. The back has a slight outward curve
after the neck attaches to it.

THE UPPER BODY

This is a simplified drawing
of the ribcage, in its actual form. This is rather complicated
and not usually necesary to draw on your character (as long as
they're wearing a shirt or are in good health), so we simplify it to
this:

It's kind of like the head,
except in this case the horizontal line connects where the shoulders
should go, and usually follows the approximate line of the
collarbones. To tilt the shoulders – guess what? – you tilt
the line. You can draw little balls on the ends of the line if
you want, to keep the mass of the shoulders if you feel like you're
having trouble with it. Make sure it stays slightly stretched
out vertically, not a perfect sphere like the head.

Here is the
torso in profile, so you can see the way the spine curves.
This is how it looks when someone is standing or sitting up, it can
bend all sorts of different ways for different actions. It's
important that you keep a space (a good space, but realistic)
between the ribcage and the hips (another circle).

Here are the
very simplified shapes of a man and a woman, for depiction of the
differences thereof. (These are both adults - children are much more
similar to each other.) A man has wider shoulders and they are
more level, while his hips are narrow. A woman, on the other
hand, generally has more narrow, sloping shoulders, and wide hips.

Here are some
quickly sketched arms, showing the deltoid muscle of the shoulder
(which is nice to keep in mind, even with sleeves) and the handy way
of indicating the elbow even when the arm is straight, by showing
the slight bulge, just below the joint, of the muscles of the lower
arm. When the arm is bent, these muscles stay in place and
appear more towards the elbow than the wrist. Remember to keep
the elbow sharp!

To see how the arm connects to the body, see the
drapery model below.

THE LOWER BODY

Here is the
right leg of a character. The upper leg is longer than the
lower, and has more volume. The calf muscle is lower on the
inside than the outside, which is the opposite with the ankle.
A good way to figure out how the leg attaches to the body is to
think of a swimsuit or underwear. We all wear underwear (I
hope) and chances are, you've seen yourself wearing it, so try to
remember what it looked like.

HANDS

First off, let
me just say that it's perfectly okay to have a hard time with hands.
They take a lot of practice and observation to get right.

Here's an easy trick that can help in some
circumstances - draw a square (the fact that this one looks more
like a rectangle is beside the point) and then draw five lines
sticking out of it: the thumb comes from the bottom, the other four
on top. The wrist attaches more towards the side of the hand
opposite the thumb.

This shape can
be turned around and put in different positions, bending the fingers
however you see fit.

When you get a
position you like, flesh out the hand. The fingers just take
practice, but the large fleshy part of the thumb is usually
delineated, as is the flesh beneath the fingers.

The
single best thing you can do to get better at hands is to draw your
own – if you're right-handed, draw your left hand, if you're left
handed, vice versa. Do this a LOT. The more you do it, the better
you'll get. You'd be amazed how many positions you can draw
your hand in while it's still attached to your body.

DRAPERY

Here's a napkin hanging on a clothesline. Pretty
boring, right?

Here's the same napkin, with wrinkles added. The
wrinkles show where the stresses are in the fabric, in this case the
tension between the points where it's attached and gravity.

Let's start with an unclothed figure, which I have
made female for reasons discussed below.

She's wearing a simple dress, with one sleeve rolled
up just for demonstration. The skirt is gathered at the waist,
so there are gathering lines showing the folds of the fabric.
Because there's more fabric in the skirt than the circumference of
the waist, it waves back and forth at the bottom, too.

Here's the same dress in a
strong wind. You still keep the gather lines in the skirt, but
they're slanted away from the wind. The only things stopping
the skirt from flying away are her legs, so it's pressed up against
them. The skirt is not stretched to its full extent yet so
there are still waves in the bottom – though they reflect the way
the wind is blowing, too, and show that they are influenced by being
attached at the waist. The loose sleeve obeys the same rule as
the skirt, though on a smaller scale.

Beware this error!
While it's admirable that you know how female anatomy works, you
don't get this effect in clothing unless you're wearing rubber clothing. It looks much better to put your brain to
work and think of how cloth would drape over it.

Here's an elbow. A
common, everyday elbow. Now let's clothe it.

Here's the same elbow with
a loose sleeve. Most of the gathering happens at the actual
bent part of the elbow. The cloth on top hangs down and
overlaps it a bit. That nifty swoopy line is a very nice way
to depict folded cloth because it actually look like that, more or
less. A tight sleeve has shorter wrinkles, but no matter ho
long the sleeve they never extend to the opposite side.

GENERAL TIPS

1. One of the very best things you can do to improve
your drawing is to draw from life, which means actually drawing what you see
in front of you. Whether it's your mom or a fork, the better you get
at accurately drawing what you see, the easier it will be to transfer the
image in your head to the paper in front of you. This is also really
good if you aren't sure how to draw something from memory - say you needed
to draw a light bulb but weren't sure exactly how all the little inside wires
worked - find a light bulb and draw it, paying attention to what you don't
know, and chances are next time you need to draw one, you'll have it there
in that mental library. If not, try again. It just takes practice.

2. To take drawing from life further, draw
people. Lots of people. Draw your family, making sure to get
facial features right. Take some paper (preferably in a sketchbook,
it's easier) to a mall, park, or airport, or somewhere with lots of people,
and draw them. If you feel insecure about this, find an inconspicuous
corner and draw people who aren't facing you. But drawing people is
the best way to learn to draw quickly and accurately (because they usually
don't hold still for very long), and get an idea for the variations that set
people apart from each other. This will also give you an idea of how
cloth works in the way it folds over joints or the way a dress folds, which
is important if you plan on drawing characters that aren't wearing
skin-tight clothes or ... nothing at all.

3. I repeat, draw your own hands. I, personally, did
most of this during my math classes, but I don't recommend you do the
same. Just do it sometime when you are supposed to have the
time. You can get many, many, many different angles on your hands in
all sorts of interesting positions. Learn the way fingers bend, where
the thick parts of the palm are, the curve of the knuckles, how your thumb
works, etc. And draw them a LOT, no matter how painful it is at first
– in fact, if it's really painful, you need to draw them more.
It'll probably be very hard at first but it's very important that you learn
to draw hands.

4. Look at the work of other artists and see how
they do their thing. Animators are exceptional artists, and they
probably draw more than any other people on the planet, so looking at their
rough sketches (this does NOT mean colouring books, this means "The Art
Of [insert animated movie here]" books, which you can usually find at a
library) can be really educational. If you have access to a DVD
player, rent (or buy, if you're really serious about it) the special
editions of Tarzan and Emperor's New Groove, and look at the rough animation
- go frame by frame and see how they use structure and rough sketches before
putting on details.

5. Draw in pencil. If you draw in pencil now,
great. If not, start. Pencil is great not because you can erase
it (though sometimes that helps, as long as you don't get carried away) but
because you can start with a really light sketch and get darker to delineate
the lines you want to use, while keeping everything nice and lively.

6. Learn to draw pre-existing cartoon
characters. Trace them or copy them at first to get a general idea of
how to draw them, then try deconstructing them using the steps above so that
you have a road map for their features. Learn to draw them so they
look like they're supposed to (or, in animation terms, on model)
without looking at reference. Learn characters from different styles
and with different features – if you learn to draw Jane from Tarzan,
don't move on next to Meg from Hercules, they're too similar.
This will give you a nice mental library of ways to draw facial features
that you can recombine in your own mind.

7. Develop your own personal style. Everyone
has their own style of drawing, just like everyone has unique
handwriting. Don't try to make your style exactly like another's just
because it's cool. It's great to be influenced by different styles,
and learning how to draw them is great exercise, but you'll probably not be
as good in a foreign style as your own.

8. Check out some cartooning books to learn how to
use action lines and make a good silhouette. I could discuss them
here, but I couldn't do it half as well as most cartooning books. The
library usually has several.

9. Remember that all of this takes loads of practice.
Scads of practice. Oodles of practice. The great artists didn't
get that way by doodling while they were talking on the phone, they devoted
their life to learning to draw just right.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas
and Ollie Johnston
Really, this is the animator's bible. Anything you
want to know about animation (and maybe some things you didn't want to
know) is in this book. Not only that, it has loads and loads of
rough drawings that are more than enough to keep an artist
happy for weeks.

How To Animate Film Cartoons by Preston
Blair
This is part of the Walter Foster how-to-draw series, and illustrates
basic construction and design principles much better than I can.
It's also got lots of useful animation basics if that's what you're
interested in doing. It's the book that most of the people in the industry today learned from.

Creating Characters with Personality by Tom Bancroft
This is a great book for anyone who's curious about character design – it goes really in-depth into construction, different shapes to use for different sorts of characters, dynamic poses, different styles, and basically everything you need to know to get going on your own art. As well as Mr Bancroft's own observations, he gets several other well-respected character designers to chip in with their thoughts.

Action Cartooning and Fantasy Cartooning by Ben Caldwell
Even if you're not interested in Action or Fantasy as subject matter, these books have really clear, really good tutorials on drawing technique, and an author who obviously kicks butt in the drawing department (by which I mean he knows what he's talking about).

Animation Magic by Don Hahn
This book is good for general information on how animation is done, on a
simpler and more cursory level. Don Hahn produced most of the famous Disney movies in the 90s so he obviously knows his stuff.
There are lots of interesting facts and great pictures in this book, plus
a glossary of animation terms and - very useful - a whole section on tips
for hopeful animators.

The Art of the Hunchback of Notre Dame
by Stephen Rebello
This is the book which I practically memorized when I was fourteen.
It has loads of incredible artwork in it, interesting text with quotes
from the people who actually made the movie, and some really funny gag
sketches in the index.
The art books from other movies are good, too (Hercules's has a lot of
animation sketches, for example, and Tarzan's is pretty darn excellent)
but Hunchback's is my personal favourite.

There are many other books out there - go for an adventure at the
library and find some of your own!